I guess I'm not getting this. The game costs no money out of pocket to play, I'm just exchanging ads for playing? Isn't that a free (as in money) game?
I agree, they need to make money somehow and I actually don't have any issue with the way Sega is doing it (ads if you don't want to pay money, or 2€ if you don't want to pay with ads).
What I object to is mainly assimilating not paying money and being free : it's not free if there are ads, you're paying with time, mind share (because there would not be that much money in ads if it was not at least a little bit effective) and potentially security (as ads are a known malware vector)
That's why I insist that free as in no money is a very restricted definition of free, and should not be considered equal to simply free, because it then undermines products that actually are free
You may as well say that a game is not free if it poses a challenge, since then you pay in frustration. When we're talking about prices, "free" refers to money. You're certainly right that there are other interesting axes you could examine games on, but I don't see how they belong on the game's price tag.
To pay in frustration the company would need to have a revenue model that could make money from your frustration.
As things stand, they have ads, which require your attention not your frustration. That means time paying attention to the ads in addition to the time spent playing the actual game.
And you keep referring to the price tag, but as everyone in software knows there are different meanings of 'free'. Not all of them refer to money, but all of them are important to understand.
In this case the argument is clearly about things like child-appropriate content; at which point there is a clearly valid need to distinguish between ad-supported and non-ad-supported apps. You can argue about what to call them if you like, but 'free' and 'ad-funded' wouldn't seem far from the mark.
There are tons of (actually) free apps and games. They can either be open source ("charity") or they could theoretically be marketing for new Xbox One/PS4/Switch Sega games.
"Free" as in other-currency-than-money isn't free.
